Norman Rush
In my New York Journal of Books review I describe the novel as "a fun and funny read about the mistakes twentysomethings make when they first live independently as adults." In addition to my NYJB review also read my Examiner article about this novel.
Read my review of Jacob’s Folly on New York Journal of Books. I continue my discussion of the novel's theme of assimilation in an Examiner article.
“So I finished my tea and dabbled at my dinner, and took a bath, and retired with a book whose secrets were guarded by my exhaustion, for almost immediately it lay open beside me on the duvet, and I woke after a while to turn off the light, and succumbed back into a dream that must have lasted most of the rest of the night, of swirling snow past a speeding train, a sensation of being unable to understand anything close by, of everything immediate flying past in a frenzy too fleet for me to grasp, while the trees and houses guarding the horizon stayed sharp and clear and precise to the eye, so that there were in the world only two things I was certain of: the feel of your hair beneath my palm, and the horizon, as patient and gradual and slow to pass as a thing remembered, even as it melted into distance and stillness and white.” -- Russ Rymer, Paris Twilight
The Vida count: Gender bias in book reviewing - New York NY | Examiner.com
For the past three years, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has been conducting a count of how many of the books reviewed by prominent publications were written by women and by men, and how many of the book reviews were assigned to female and male reviewers. The lopsided results have helped begin a conversation about gender bias in the literary world.
This past Wednesday, May 29, 2013, that conversation took the form of a panel discussion at the Center for Fiction in midtown Manhattan hosted by the National Book Critics Circlewhose annual meeting was held in the same building earlier that afternoon (and of which this examiner is a voting member). The panelists provided anecdotal accounts that support the findings of the Vida count: women authors are under-reviewed at major publications where women book critics are still a minority of book reviewers.
One of the panelists, New York Magazine's recently hired book critic Kathryn Schulz, did a count of her male predecessor Sam Anderson's book reviews and found that his reviews of books by male authors outnumbered his reviews by female authors 8 to 1. She then did a count of her own reviews and found that her ratio was 4 to 3, still favoring authors who are men.
Of the fifty or so book reviews this examiner has published (mainly on New York Journal of Books) books by men outnumber those by women 3 to 2. In my own defense I will point out that the few books I have panned and criticized most harshly have all been by men. Going forward I will make more of an effort to find women authors whose work I enjoy.
Overall there are a roughly equal number of books published by men and women authors, but the numbers vary by genre: male authors predominate in non-fiction, women authors predominate in children's literature and are also a majority of authors of poetry books, and the genders are about equal in adult fiction.
Another panelist, New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul, pointed out that when that publication wants to draw attention to a particular book and indicate its significance the review is always assigned to a reviewer whose gender is the opposite of the author.
The sole male panelist, Tin House editor and co-founder Rob Spillman, quoted statistics that show he takes the Vida count seriously and in the past three years has achieved gender parity among the authors reviewed by his magazine as well as among its reviewers. Unfortunately Tin House appears to be in the minority among periodicals that review books.
Mr. Spillman also noted that male writers handle rejection better than female writers. He said that even if encouraging words requesting a writer's next piece of writing are added to a rejection letter women writers will not submit to that publication again, whereas men will send in more work no matter how emphatic and negative the tone of the rejection letter.
Women authors and reviewers continue to face gender bias.
“The Golem and the Jinni is recommended to adults who enjoy a good story and have a childlike sense of make-believe.”
My review of The Golem and the Jinni | New York Journal of Books. Also see additional remarks in my examiner.com article:
The folklore underlying the book is both Eastern European Jewish and Levantine Arab in origin. Jewish folk tales are fun reads, but in most of them you won't learn much about Judaism. The same is true of this novel. In interviews Ms. Wecker has admitted that her knowledge of Judaism is by and large limited to what she learned as a child in Hebrew school.
The first of the two title characters is created by a corrupt kabbalist. Here Ms. Wecker is taking poetic license. Traditional Judaism has its share of magic and superstition, but the magic is supposed to be white magic. In theory a corrupt kabbalist would be an ineffective one, since the efficacy of the magic depends on the purity of the practitioner's intent as well as on his or her strict ritual observance, but from a Jungian perspective we all have a shadow side to our psyches, and anyway, this is a book whose premise demands multiple suspensions of disbelief.
As in most love stories boy meets girl, they get to know each other noting similarities and differences, they break up, and a dramatic crisis reminds them of their feelings for each other and brings them back together. To find out how that basic scenario plays out in detail for the novel's supernatural title characters you'll have to read the book.
In addition to the title characters the book has a strong cast of supporting characters including the title characters' human mentors, protectors, and co-workers, and people in Eastern Europe and the Levant who figure in the backstories prior to the title characters' immigration to late 19th Century New York.
Ms. Wecker wrote The Golem and the Jinni as an attempt to combine the folklores of her Jewish ancestors and of her Arab-American husband's ancestors and to imagine a time and place where Jews and Arabs lived in peace as neighbors. But the historical reality in turn of the previous century New York was that the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side and the Arab immigrants of the Lower West Side rarely crossed paths. It is also worth noting that turn of the previous century Levantine Jewish immigrants chose to live among their European co-religionists on the Lower East Side rather than among their former neighbors from the old country in Little Syria.
In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend The Golem and the Jinni "to adults who enjoy a good story and have a childlike sense of make-believe." This novel would make a terrific HBO original series combining the supernatural elements of True Blood and Game of Thrones with the historical authenticity of Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, John Adams,and Rome.
My review of A.B. Yehoshua's new novel The Retrospective. Also see my examiner.com article:
A.B. Yehoshua's new novel The Retrospectiveis a book I enjoyed reading while I was reading it but one that left me somewhat disappointed afterward. In my New York Journal of books review I explore the novel's multiple allegories and describe it as "a quick and easy read" despite its layers of meaning. My use of the phrase "quick and easy" may have something to do with the fact that I read The Retrospectiveshortly after reading William Gass' comparatively difficult novel Middle C. I actually prefer dense prose and more challenging use of language, but Mr. Yehoshua's naturalistic dialogue as well as his use of symbolism and allegory kept me engaged.
The Retrospective is an autobiographical novel in which cinema stands in for fiction and a film director represents the novelist. Indeed the director attends a retrospective of his early films and receives a prize in Santiago de Compostela, the same Spanish city where his author was awarded a literature prize. The novel's Hebrew title can be translated as Spanish Charity and its central image is Roman Charity, a story of a daughter who breast feeds her starving father depicted in numerous Renaissance paintings. Pardon the pun, but Mr. Yehoshua milks the image for all the symbolic and allegorical meaning it can yield. See my New York Journal of Books review for a fuller discussion of those allegories.
Next month will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Cruelty, the first of eightbooks of poetry by the poet whose pen name and legal middle name was Ai and the third anniversary of her death from breast cancer at age 62. Today W.W. Norton is publishing all eight of her poetry books in one volume as The Collected Poems of Ai. In my review of the book in New York Journal of Books I note that at a time when most American poetry was autobiographical Ai wrote dramatic monologues in other people's voices.
In his introduction to the book poet Yusef Komunyakaacompares Ai's dramatic approach to that of a method actor. Another analogy for the way Ai inhabited other people's voices and roles would be the one woman shows of Anna Deavere Smith.
Ai's poems are not to everyone's taste. If you prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, Howling Wolf to Muddy Waters, the gritty realism (including graphic violence and strong sexual content) of HBO's Sunday night original series to PBS' British dramas you'll probably enjoy Ai's poetry; if not, stay with safer, tamer, less edgy poets. But even if you're fond of her poems you'll probably want to pace yourself at just a few at a time because of their frequent and brutal violence.
Ai is drawn to the shocking and perverse. She quotes the Rolling Stone's song "Gimme Shelter" in her poem"The Mortician's Twelve-Year-Old Son," a poem whose depiction of necrophilia one could imagine dramatized on HBO. In my NYJB review I quote "The Kid" as an example of graphic violence in Ai's work. In "Knockout" Mike Tyson’s rape of Desiree Washington is discussed by an inner city sex worker who has no empathy for Ms. Washington. In “Why Can’t I Leave You?” Ai addresses marriage and sexuality in the context of rural poverty from the wife's perspective.
Quite a few of Ai's poems are in the voices of villains. She lets the bad guy tell his side of the story and in so doing he incriminates himself. "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981" is in the voice of a serial killer (see video). In "Kristallnacht," a four part six and a half page poem, the speaker is a half French half German former Nazi collaborator. The poem's final couplet is haunting: "Pretend I died for nothing/instead of living for it."
In “Life Story,” another six and a half page poem, the speaker is a Roman Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse, and in “Family Portrait, 1960” the speaker is the poet’s step-father whom her bed-ridden mother asks to supervise eleven year old Florence and her seven year old half sister Roslynn as they shower instructing them to “scrub your little pussies.”
History is a recurring theme in Ai's work with poems in the voices of Leon Trotsky, J. Robert Oppenheim, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Clinton and George W. Bush, among others as well as lesser known figures. Ezra Pound defined an epic as a "poem including history." The Collected Poems of Ai is an everyman and woman's The Cantos for the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries.
Also see my NYJB review: http://goo.gl/0IjEa
J.K Rowling was famously rejected by a mighty 12 publishers before Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone was accepted by Bloomsbury - and even then only at the insistence of the chairman's eight-year-old daughter.
Judy Blume, Gertrude Stein and D.H Lawrence all got a lot of 'no's from publishers before any said yes.
But while some were chucked quietly in the publishers' bin of doom, others recieved an additional slap in the face in the form of some frankly hilarious criticism.
It probably wasn't fun to receive at the time, but now these writers have found their place on bookshelves worldwide, we imagine they quite enjoy reflecting on those publishers who got it embarrassingly wrong...
( Read more... )According to the publishers who rejected them Sylvia Plath had no talent, and Borges was untranslatable. An editor who rejected Nabokov's Lolita wrote, "overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian...the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy." Replace "unsure" with "brilliant" and subtract the adverb "overwhelmingly" and the adjectives "hideous" and "improbable" and his comment would be not far from the mark and an argument for why it should have been published.
New York Jewish fiction writer Susan Daitch's third novel Paper Conspiracies, which was published last week by City Lights Books, takes an indirect approach to late Nineteenth Century France's Dreyfus Affair by way of peripheral minor actors in the scandal and via cinema pioneer Georges Mèliés' contemporaneous dramtized documentary film L'affaire Dreyfus. The novel's six sections alternate between 1990s New York and Paris in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1968.
In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I enthusiastically recommend the book "to fans of highbrow, erudite historical fiction. Readers who enjoy the novels of Umberto Eco, for example, will probably also enjoy those of Ms. Daitch.” I also draw an analogy between late Nineteenth Century French anti-Semitism and Twentyfirst Century American Islamophobia.
While covering the Dreyfus trial as an Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl despaired of Jews ever integrating into western democracies and instead turned to separatist nationalism. But with the exception of the period of German occupation and its puppet Vichy government in the early 1940s the Dreyfus scandal had the long-term effect of marginalizing and banishing from power France's extreme right wing who wanted to replace the liberal, secular republic with a return to authoritarian rule dominated by the church and the traditional aristocracy.
For more info: David Cooper
What happens when a New York Jewish pack-rat daughter inherits her New York Jewish pack-rat father's belongings? She embarks on a Jewish genealogical search for her and her dad's long lost relatives. Nancy K. Miller's What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, published today by University of Nebraska Press, is the story of that search, a story that focuses more on the process of the search than on its results. In my New York Journal of Books review I quote Ms. Miller, “Every new piece of information keeps me on the road to the ever-expanding possibility of the quest, a quest that in the end will still yield only partial knowledge—and will never give me, return to me, those past lives.” Ms. Miller, a retired CUNY Graduate Center English and Comparative Literature professor, is an appealing prose stylist, but because of its focus on the genalogical search process this book will mostly appeal to genealogy buffs in general and Jewish genealogy buffs in particular.
For more info: David Cooper
This article first appeared on the late Examiner.com
an impressive list of the first occurrences of classic profanities in the magazine’s pages.
Also see: BONFIRE OF THE PROFANITIES
Today New York publisher The Dial Press, a division of Random House, releases Haley Tanner's debut novel Vaclav and Lena, a coming of age tale about Russian-Jewish immigrant children in Brooklyn. In my New York Journal of Books review I describe the book as "a tale of unconditional love; of attachment, separation, and reunion; and of trauma and healing." It's an engaging read that will appeal to teens, their parents, and anyone interested in the immigrant experience.
Ms. Tanner is a Brooklyn resident who got the idea for the story when she was a tutor whose students were Russian immigrant children not unlike the novel's title characters. For a view of more affluent, better educated suburban Russian-Jewish immigrants try The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman.
For more info: David Cooper
via the late examiner.comWhen Canadian poet and novelist Leonard Cohen decided to become a singer/songwriter four and a half decades ago he moved to New York City to launch his new career. New York is mentioned in his songs "Chelsea Hotel" and "Famous Blue Raincoat." And today a New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, is publishing a selection of Cohen's poems and songs in its Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, a series that includes some of the best loved English language poets. In my New York Journal of Books review of Leonard Cohen Poems and Songs I describe the small handsomely made volume as a likely gift book.
Cohen is an alumnus of Herzliah High School in Montreal. Jewish themes are found throughout his work in such songs as "Story of Isaac" and "Who by Fire" which is based on the Unetaneh Tokef high holiday prayer. He observes the Sabbath while on tour. Seeing his work on the page finds that Cohen spells the word God with a hyphen following Orthodox Jewish practice. He also spent five years living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, but he sees no contradiction with his Judaism. "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief." (Source: 2009 NY Times article)
Montreal's ubiquitous Catholicism has also influenced Cohen as he describes in his prose poem, "Montreal":
We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. . . . The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people.
Leonard Cohen Poems and Songs includes some of the psalm like prose poems from his 1984 Book of Mercy. In my New York Journal of Books review I quote "All My Life":
All my life is broken unto you, and all my glory soiled unto you. Do not let the spark of my soul go out in the even sadness. Let me raise the brokenness to you, to the world where the breaking is for love. Do not let the words be mine, but change them into truth. With these lips instruct my heart, and let fall into the world what is broken in the world. Lift me up to the wrestling of faith. Do not leave me where the sparks go out, and the jokes are told in the dark, and the new things are called forth and appraised in the scale of the terror. Face me to the rays of love, O source of light, or face me to the majesty of your darkness, but not here, do not leave me here, where death is forgotten, and the new thing grins.
Starting today Leonard Cohen Poems and Songs is available at book stores and on-line book vendors.
For more info: David Cooper
Now that another secular calendar year is beginning I would like to share my recommendations of Jewish fiction and poetry books published last year. This is not a "best of" list, merely a list of Jewish themed books published in 2010 that I have actually read and reviewed at my other writing gig as a book reviewer at New York Journal of Books.
As people of the book it is a fortunate coincidence that we Jewish New Yorkers not only constitute the nation's largest Jewish community but also inhabit what remains the country's center of book publishing. So now that another secular calendar year is beginning I would like to share my recommendations of Jewish fiction and poetry books published last year. This is not a "best of" list, merely a list of Jewish themed books published in 2010 that I have actually read and reviewed at my other writing gig as a book reviewer at New York Journal of Books. Here then are my recommended Jewish books of 2010 in reverse chronological order by publication date:
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, Edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, was published on December 14, 2010. In my NYJB review I wrote that this anthology "includes stories that will appeal to nearly every taste in short fiction, but the corollary is that not every story will appeal to every reader." The authors of these stories include Peter S. Beagle, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Lavie Tidhar, Tamar Yellin, and Jane Yolen.
Nadia Kalman's debut novel The Cosmopolitans was published on December 1, 2010. In my NYJB review I described this family drama about a couple of Russian-Jewish immigrant scientists living in Stamford, CT with their three young adult daughters as "smart, funny, wise, and entertaining." Nadia Kalman will read from and sign copies of The Cosmopolitans atCommunity Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Thursday January 6, 2011.
I mentioned the recently published English language edition of Eden by Israeli author Yael Hedaya, Translated by Jessica Cohen, in my October 25, 2010 article in this space. "For its strong prose and psychologically complex characters whose lives are interwoven," I recommended the novel in my NYJB review "... to all literary fiction readers, especially those interested in marriage and psychology."
C.K. Williams' most recent book of poems, Wait, was published on April 27, 2010. As I mentioned in my NYJB review, "The book concludes with 'Jew on Bridge,' a long poem comprising thirty tercets on the theme of anti-Semitism and Williams’ own Jewishness." But even in those poems that have no specific Jewish theme Williams demonstrates a strong moral conscience that is quite Jewish.
The English language edition of Homesick by Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo, Translated bySondra Silverston, was published on April 20, 2010. In my NYJB review I described it as "a warm, embracing novel that captures how, lacking clear boundaries, Israeli neighbors observe one another’s private lives close up" and that it reminded me of the novels of Nevo's "literary fathers, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua."
Russian born Israeli writer Alex Epstein's book of very short stories or flash fiction Blue Has No South, translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay, was published on April 1, 2010. In my NYJB review I described these very short texts as "surreal, absurd, and/or paradoxical," and to my eye and ear, prose poems. My review quotes a generous sample of excerpts from the book and recommends it "to cerebral and off-center readers."
Jennifer Gilmore's novel Something Red, published on March 20, 2010, is a family drama set in Washington, DC in 1979-80. It happens to be the only book on this list that also made the New York Times Notable 100 Books of 2010 list. In my NYJB review I wrote that the novel is of particular interest to Red Diaper babies, the children and grandchildren of Americans who from the 1920s through the 1950s were Communists and other left-wing activists, and other readers who are interested in recent history and family dynamics and are willing to overlook the novel's flaws.
Prolific Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld's most recent novel, Blooms of Darkness, was published in Jeffrey Green’s translation from the Hebrew on March 9, 2010. Like most of Appelfeld's fiction his latest novel concerns the Shoah. The protagonist is an eleven year old Jewish boy who hidden by a prostitute in the very brothel where the Nazi soldiers who are arresting and deporting all the Jews of his Eastern European city to death camps go to spend their off-duty hours. In my NYJB review "I enthusiastically recommend Blooms of Darkness to all thoughtful and sensitive readers."
Dutch Jewish novelist Marcel Moring's ambitious but uneven novel In a Dark Wood is the most literary novel I read in the past year and the one that most rewards rereading. The book was published in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside on February 16, 2010. Inmy NYJB review I described it as "a highly literary, imaginative, and experimental novel that explores large themes—including Jewish identity after the Holocaust and the search for meaning amid the emptiness and rewards of middle-class existence—in inventive ways." I recommend it guardedly only to the most sophisticated readers who have "a solid command of the western literary canon."
Most of the friends and relatives to whom I enthusiastically recommended Kenneth Wishnia's historical detective novel The Fifth Servant disliked it. I, however, enjoyed this tale of a blood libel case in Sixteenth Century Prague immensely. The book was published on January 26, 2010, and in my NYJB review I wrote, "Wishnia deftly deploys his vast research to transport us to a very different time and place," and I described The Fifth Servant as a "richly textured and immensely entertaining book."
In 2011 I plan to devote more time to reading and reviewing books and less to my examiner column. I don't plan to abandon this column entirely, but a health issue is taking up more of my time and attention, and with less free time I have to prioritize.
For more info: David Cooper
This article first appeared on the late examiner.com
"No one with 'literary' aspirations will expect to earn a living by publishing books; the glory days when publishers still waffled between patronage and commerce will be much lamented. The lit-lovers who used to become editors and agents will direct MFA programs instead; the book industry will become as rational—that is, as single-mindedly devoted to profit—as every other capitalist industry."
Will? Is it not to a considerable extent already so?
The author marks the boundaries of literary Brooklyn as DUMBO and Prospect Heights, but it is more accurate to draw its boundaries as a triangle that goes from Greenpoint in the northwest to Victorian Flatbush in the east to Red Hook in the southwest.
As a native New Yorker, Brooklynite, alumnus of a CCNY graduate creative writing program, poet/translator and fiction reviewer I am on the periphery of both literary cultures, and much of the article resonates with the ring of truth. However, in an era of government budget cuts I don't see MFA programs continuing to proliferate; indeed, they may prove vulnerable to the budget ax.
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